How would you describe the shape of Latin America’s fibre market?

There’s a huge amount of data consumption right now among both enterprises and consumers, putting stress on networks. Content providers are under pressure to be closer to customers, requiring new routes and locations to support them.

In addition, the likes of agentic AI and data-sovereignty demands are driving the need for local connectivity and applications. That’s why you see the likes of Amazon and Google establishing local footprints and zones in South America, and Oracle operating public cloud regions.

What are the biggest challenges to overcome in Latin America in rolling out sufficient fibre to support demand?

One is that demand is growing faster than capacity is being put in place, and it can also take a while to get the necessary government permits and financing. That means there’s a mismatch between requirements and what can be offered right now, but there’s a focus on hardware upgrades to use the same fibre at higher capacities.

There are also uncertainties about payback on investment, with a lot of AI hype about data centres and questions about whether the bubble might burst at some point. In addition, government changes or instability can trigger challenges in deploying infrastructure.

How do you see Cirion’s role in overcoming these challenges and addressing needs for additional fibre?

We’re having many discussions with partners to calibrate where they want to go, and working out how we can be more agile and flexible in addressing unpredictable developments.

As part of this, we’re working on AI implementations that will allow us to act faster in service delivery and making changes, while having better visibility into the network and being able to predict potential issues.

Furthermore, we’re applying data analytics to the network to better assess growth trends, developing network-as-a-service technology and making our infrastructure more API- and digitally driven.

How is Cirion changing its general processes to deal with these issues?

It’s about breaking out of the traditional way of acting like a telco and instead being more like a tech co. In line with this, we’re following a strategy of ‘progress over perfection’, whereby we’re creating different versions of products from release because many customers today want new solutions to solve their problems quickly rather than perfection.

As the network evolves into an increasingly flexible fabric and more security is needed, the strategy is being implemented through a redesign of our anti-DDoS services to enable more variants. It will also be implemented with new SD-WAN and SASE services, plus we’re working on pilots on quantum security.

How is the company increasing its flexibility in upgrading capacity?

We’re working on how to make the network more future-proof by having it set up to accommodate additional capacities, as well as with our vendor partners to adapt their new technologies and experiment.

This is because we have customers that start with 100G, then request 400G maybe only six months later – and now some are asking for 800G. We know that flexibility will be needed when the World Cup happens in Canada, Mexico and the US in June as well, which is why we’re talking to customers about large-scale events like that too.

Where in Latin America is Cirion putting its main focus for fibre networks currently, and how do you see the way ahead?

Brazil is a big area of investment because of the explosive growth we see there in data centres, and in terrestrial and subsea capacity. But we’re also looking at adding more incremental capacity further south in the likes of Argentina and Chile, and more resiliency and redundancy to our networks.

Our mid-term focus is on building more capacity on the Pacific coast in the west – not necessarily just by ourselves, but also in partnership with other providers.

In the long term, Cirion’s aim is to connect up South America to the rest of the world through the Southern Hemisphere, providing a robust alternative to the concentration of intercontinental submarine cables in the North via a smart network fabric truly ready for dealing with uncertainty.